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Mr. Bloomberg’s Logic

If Mayor Michael Bloomberg was trying to stem the criticism of his constitutionally suspect stop-and-frisk policy over the weekend, he took a rather strange approach with his loopy logic and discredited arguments. Speaking on his weekly radio program, Mr. Bloomberg dismissed the idea that the policy, under which hundreds of thousands of mainly minority citizens are stopped on the streets every year, is racially imbalanced because it singles out people based on race.

Focusing on murders, Mr. Bloomberg said those crimes are mainly committed by minority residents and that witnesses identify the suspects that way. “In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” the mayor said. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they say.”

The very idea that white people are being stopped on the streets too often is laughable. But that’s not where the problems with the mayor’s argument end.

The homicide part of it is also problematic. Mr. Bloomberg has often credited stop-and-frisk with bringing the murder rate to an all-time low. But if crime and street stops were strongly related, the murder rate would have gone up last year, when stops went down by about 20 percent.

Furthermore, many of the stops made by the department have been found by some prosecutors and a federal court to be unlawful; the officers did not have grounds for reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan has yet to rule in the case of Floyd v. City of New York, whose plaintiffs charge the city with racial discrimination. But she laid out the legal deficiencies of the program last year after examining the data from nearly three million stops by the department, about 85 percent of them involving blacks and Hispanics.

In at least 170,000 cases, the judge noted, the reasons given by the police officers for making the stops were insufficient to establish reasonable suspicion, rendering the stops unlawful. In tens of thousands of cases, officers gave no reason other than “furtive movement,” a description so vague as to be meaningless. In other cases, officers gave no other reason besides “high crime area,” even when this was not the case. And, in more than a half-million stops, according to court documents, officers “listed no coherent suspected crime.”

When city lawyers tried to argue that so many minority residents are stopped because they commit more crime, Judge Scheindlin called the argument “worrisome” and wondered if it might lead officers to single out people based on race. She further described the argument as circular: The fact that the stops reflected similar percentages as the crime suspect data, she noted, could show that the officers were influenced by awareness of the trends reflected in those data.

While raging against the stop-and-frisk program’s critics on his radio broadcast, the mayor argued that those critics needed to brush up on math and logic. The same could be said of His Honor.